alt Hacker NewsWhat's a reasonable setup for sailing the seas safely?
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
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A day or so of setup (if you're completely new) and you'll need a usenet sub (recommended) or torrent site (or sites, quality may vary on open trackers) but the *arr stack can be automated[1] to make sure you have the best quality versions of each episode/movie fairly easily.
In general terms, set up a seedbox VM that is configured so it can only access the internet through Tor/VPN. Join a private tracker (I recommend IPT). Only allow file transfer one-way to your NAS or whatever, then use something like Jellyfin to pull from that.
Depends how much you want to automate, but all you really need is a VPN (or so I am told). There are some good docker containers that bundle the VPN, Transmission, and a dead-man's switch for the connection (allegedly)
The *arr stack. prowlarr, radarr and sonarr. Pain to set up, but once it's there, it's very convenient to use.
(Couple with Plex/Jellyfin).
Define safely. A VPN and a browser gets you streams and a VPN and a torrent client gets you downloads.
If you’re lazy and don’t mind dealing with a few ads, search yandex for ‘[content name] free stream’ and use one of the many pirate stream sites that show up in the results. Adblocker highly recommended.
I have access to a well-seeded 20+ year old private tracker but usually use the above method to stream content for free these days.
Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.